Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Long distance connections

 
It's only today, a week after returning from the Philippines, that I'm feeling well enough to write anything at all, and only now after well more than a week away from 'our' village that I have any kind of perspective on what we've done there.  Drastically abbreviated version:  my family and I, to commemorate the lost life of a loved one, are funding and building a small village of humble little cinder block houses in rural Philippines.  These houses are to be used by up to 100 families who are currently living in small thatched huts on the beach, staring into the vortex of typhoon alley.  It's not well appreciated that Asian typhoons are gaining in strength much more quickly than the Atlantic hurricanes that receive much more Western press.  Last year's Typhoon Durian packed winds topping 260 km/hr -- quite a bit more strength than Katrina, and dropped 18 inches of rain on parts of the Philippines, causing mudslides, flooding, destruction of homes, and loss of life.  Thousands who lost everything in Durian are still homeless and destitute. 

Our 'build', sponsored by the Philippine group Gawad Kalinga, is in an area of Bicol province called Prieto Diaz.  There, a busy, resourceful and enlightened mayor named Benito Doma works tirelessly to find ways to bring struggling families from the brink of destruction to sustainable lives.  In addition to the increasingly devastating typhoons, he has to contend with environmental carnage being wrought by an Australian owned mining company, Lafayette NL, which uses open pit mining methods and toxic chemicals which have, three times now, flooded waterways and poisoned significant numbers of fish and dolphins, thus making inroads on what little means of livelihood is available to the local people.  As far as I can tell, the national government is either unable or unwilling to act decisively on behalf of the people whose lives are being destroyed and Doma stands almost alone, a local hero, holding many lives together.

Similar stories are being played out all across the globe.  People without voices are having their lives and livelihoods gutted by climate change and offshore economic interests, much of which is being driven by the thoughtless greed of those of us in developed countries. 

In my book, I talk about the difficulty of making the connections between our own actions as we flick on a few extra lights to bring cheer on cold winter nights, drive the van to the mall to find cheap Christmas goods, or shop for that special gold bracelet for a loved one.  It's a matter of psychology more than anything else -- we don't find it easy or straightforward to draw lines between our own comfortable niches in home and office and the plight of a malnourished little girl hiding behind a rock, watching her home get swept into the sea. 

Even though I still can't say I feel in my bones the connection between my life here in Canada and the lives of those I just left behind in Prieto Diaz, going there, carrying bricks, laying cement, holding hands and dancing with those kids has certainly had some impact.  Now, when I read reports of a new typhoon heading for Bicol, I can connect the story with real people who will have to find a way to survive what's coming.  I may still not understand exactly where they are, but I know they're there.  I've heard their voices, seen their faces, and held some of them in my arms.

Rocking with RIM

There's much to say about my recent trip to the Philippines to help build houses for a group of families living on a dot of beach in the middle of typhoon alley, but I'm not ready to address it here yet -- the thoughts and feelings are far too large and unruly to be trapped by words yet.  Here's something completely different. 

I crashed the RIM party last night.  Everybody in my town knows about RIM (Research in Motion), the company that is responsible not only for the ubiquitous Blackberry but also for a not inconsiderable chunk of Waterloo Region's current economic health.  Not long after I came to the University of Waterloo in 1991, I noticed recruitment posters for a startup company that was interested in 'mobile computing.'  When I read the flyers, the only mental connection I made was with the work of a professor at the University of Toronto who was making waves by walking around town wearing a slew of devices to record his daily movements -- cameras installed on eyeglasses, accelerometers, and so on.  So I chuckled at the idea that somebody thought there might be a commercially viable idea in what seemed to me at the time to be a bit of amusing academic crackpottery.  As they say in literature....Little did I know.

The annual party was held this year at the Air Canada Centre and it featured two rock bands -- The Tragically Hip and Van Halen (early this morning I had to deliver a lecture on hearing loss -- I was able to give a firsthand account based on my experiences last night in row 5).  It was a fun event.  I wanted to take a few pictures, but as my own pocket addiction is not a Blackberry but an HTC 6800 Pocket PC smart phone, I was afraid that, if I pulled it out, several burly security guards would pounce on me and eject me from the bash.

But here's what really interested me about this celebration.  Here we all were, several thousand party-goers celebrating the success of a device that is really designed to circumvent the limitations of space and time.  What's great about a Blackberry?  It's always on, delivering seamless, instant access to email.  Wherever we are, with Blackberry in hand, we are viscerally connected to everywhere else.  On my Philippines trip, one lady lay on the floor of the hut we were staying in, beaming moment-by-moment updates to her husband of the goings-on in a primitive village in rural Philippines where many had never seen a white face before ours.  We chose to celebrate the success of this device by getting into cars, buses, or in some cases into enormously long stretch limousines, and braving traffic between Waterloo and Toronto (it took my wife and I almost 3 hours to make the drive through traffic) so that we could all be together, shoulder to sweaty shoulder, in one gigantic room.  My daughters, sitting in the back seat of the car in a morass of traffic were receiving texts on their phones describing events on the stage that we were missing. and so they had their own little connection with things.  But there's no question that the real action was not bouncing around among satellites, coursing through the internet, or bipping along in fibre optic cables.  The real action was in a real place filled with real people who could reach out and touch, hear (if they yelled) and see one another.

I found a certain irony in the fact that we were celebrating the success of a little black box that makes information wormholes in space by doing exactly the thing that it purports to make superfluous.  For all our love of technological action at a distance, we still find it hard to dance alone.